Kokinshu Commentary -- 3

Book 1 – Spring

3. Anonymous. Topic unknown

Where are we to seek
The layered haze of springtime
While snow still falls
In the hills of Yoshino,
The hills of fair Yoshino?

Comment: The approach of spring is sometimes hinted at by a kind of haze that lifts off the snow or the cold ground. When it is really cold there is no haze, rather there is a crisp clearness to the air. So haze is an intimation of spring, a very early sign that spring is coming.

This Tanka links with Tanka 2 in this emphasis on very early signals of approaching spring. Tanka 2 focused on melting frozen waters, which often happens before there are buds or other more obvious signs of spring. Tanka 3 focuses on the spring haze. If one reads both Tanka 2 and 3 together, they form a complete landscape of the earliest signs that spring is coming.

‘Yoshino’ was a short-lived district (716-738), carved out of the Yamato district, and fairly quickly reabsorbed into Yamato. It is located in present day Nara Prefecture. The Yamato district was central to the development of Japan both culturally and politically. The last two lines referring to the ‘hills of Yoshino’, therefore, have a special meaning. This kind of meaning roughly corresponds to a phrase like ‘purple mountains majesties’ in the song ‘America the Beautiful’. This Tanka, therefore, seeks to express the particular beauty of Japan for the Japanese people.

A word about the author, ‘anonymous’. According to the translator, Helen McCullough, in her book on the Kokinshu, “Brocade by Night”, ‘Anonymous’ is the author of 460 poems in the Kokinshu collection. This is by far the largest group of poems. As mentioned previously, the largest group for a named author is Ki no Tsurayuki at 102 poems. So Anonymous has more than four times as many poems as the most frequently named author. This means that over 40% of the poems in the Kokinshu are by unknown authors.

It is interesting to speculate as to the sources of these unknown authors. Tentatively there seem to be a number of possibilities. Some of the anonymous Tanka are probably from very early sources and Tsurayuki did not know the actual author.

Some of them are likely to have been folk songs, or verses extracted from folk songs. Like the Sonnet, Tanka has its origin in song; the earliest name for this type of verse is simply ‘uta’, which means song. I think it is possible that this Tanka, Tanka 3, is a kind of folk song whose origin is in the people native to the Yoshino/Nara area. The last two lines have the kind of repetition that one often sees in folk songs and I can easily think of it as a refrain of a longer, multi-verse, song. There is a strong precedent for the inclusion of folk songs because Confucius included large numbers of these kinds of poems in his collection ‘The Book of Odes’.

Another possibility for Anonymous would be known authors who were currently out of favor at court. The editors may have wanted to include a Tanka by someone for whom it was politically dangerous to be associated with. And so the name ‘Anonymous’ could be a way out of this difficulty. Remember that the Kokinshu was an Imperially commissioned collection, with all the political implications that such sponsorship implies.

Finally, ‘Anonymous’ may designate a member of a rival house of poetry. In Japan during this period there were rival houses, or extended families and their students, who specialized in the art and way of poetry. They all vied for official recognition and the fortunes of patronage. To include a Tanka from a rival house would be to acknowledge that other tradition’s worthiness, causing difficulty among the associates in one’s own house and tradition. But it would be possible to slip in a Tanka from a rival house, assuming one admired it, by claiming that one did not know the author.

All of the above are possibilities. But the wonderful thing about all of these anonymous Tanka is that by including so many it guarantees that we get to hear a multitude of different voices. Think of how different the Kokinshu would have been if the editors had decided to only include named Tanka, those Tanka with secure attribution. There would have been fewer perspectives, and a more limited range of expression.

The result of including so many Anonymous Tanka is that as one progresses through the Kokinshu one moves from Tanka that are obviously sophisticated, penned from someone trained in literary technique, to Tanka that are simple and unsophisticated. So the Kokinshu retains the full spectrum of Tanka styles that were current at that time, offering us a window into how Tanka were treated by a wide range of different people.